Since the stream of news is still pretty much dry, I figured I'd throw in something I've been meaning to talk about for a while now, but really didn't dare to: KDE4's performance. Since experiences with KDE4 seem to widely differ between people, it might be a good idea if we, together, can find a common cause among those of us having problems.

I have almost the exact same hardware as Thom... though with different software. I get excellent performance on almost the same machine. So I have a feeling its one of two things you have Thom.

1) Kubuntu. Its notoriously buggy KDE packages may be the source of your daily crashes. I've run KDE 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 and the various patch releases for *months* without a crash. Yes thats right, months. I'm using Arch Linux.

2) FGLRX. Its crap. Seriously, buggiest driver possible to use. If you want 3D wait a little bit, get an older radeon card that has FOSS 3D already, or get an NVIDIA card. In any case use the ATI driver, xf86-video-ati in archlinux. I use xrender for kwin compositing and it works *perfectly* with better performance then the nvidia card with the nvidia driver I use at work.

Given the two suggestions above I'm sure your issues will disappear if you

* Use the FOSS ati driver
* Use a distro that is known not to have buggy KDE packages. Its so well known bugs from Kubuntu are often simply attributed to Kubuntu instead of KDE itself.

I have almost the exact same hardware as Thom... though with different software. I get excellent performance on almost the same machine. So I have a feeling its one of two things you have Thom.

1) Kubuntu. Its notoriously buggy KDE packages may be the source of your daily crashes. I've run KDE 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 and the various patch releases for *months* without a crash. Yes thats right, months. I'm using Arch Linux.

2) FGLRX. Its crap. Seriously, buggiest driver possible to use. If you want 3D wait a little bit, get an older radeon card that has FOSS 3D already, or get an NVIDIA card. In any case use the ATI driver, xf86-video-ati in archlinux. I use xrender for kwin compositing and it works *perfectly* with better performance then the nvidia card with the nvidia driver I use at work.

Given the two suggestions above I'm sure your issues will disappear if you

* Use the FOSS ati driver
* Use a distro that is known not to have buggy KDE packages. Its so well known bugs from Kubuntu are often simply attributed to Kubuntu instead of KDE itself.

I would like to endorse this also.

Right now, I am running Arch with KDE 4.3.4 (the default KDE, not KDEmod), which has just moved kernel 2.6.32 to core.